CHAPTER 34

I didn’t feel much like volleyball the next morning, but I forced my body through the motions and pretty soon the rhythm of the game took over, pulsing its urgent beat through my tired muscles: serve and return, spike and dig, setup, setup, over the net. My body loosened, my knee moved smoothly, and my mind woke to the rush of adrenaline. Kristy had a fine service game, and I got hot in the corner. We wound up aceing a tough inner-city Y team, and back in the locker room, panting and sweating, my hair soaked and my right arm practically dead, I was glad to be alive, glad I’d played.

I swam my twenty laps, showered, and dressed, then cut across the Mass. Ave. traffic to Dunkin’ Donuts. I ordered two glazed doughnuts and coffee to go, and that’s when I first realized I’d decided to visit Valerie in the hospital.

It was the first real spring day, the kind that said forget about winter, this is New England. The sun sparkled on tree branches that burst with tiny spearmint buds, the green new and fresh. I took off my sunglasses even though it meant squinting against the sun. I wanted the colors natural. My Toyota hummed, unharmed by its nighttime adventure, and I wound down the window and enjoyed the wind on my face.

Valerie was in Concord Hospital, a small well-endowed suburban place I’d never had occasion to visit. Still, a hospital is a hospital and the routine held. A plump lady at the front desk told me Valerie was in the A wing, Room 341. Take the elevators to the right.

I didn’t inquire about visiting hours. She didn’t tell me. I was there and I intended to visit.

Hospital beds diminish even the beefiest cops. Valerie looked tiny, half her age, tucked in the solemn whiteness of the mechanical bed. Her nose was completely hidden under white bandaging and plaster. Both eyes were black: deep, sunken, raccoon eyes. Her right cheek was rough and reddened, her left wrist immobilized with a cast.

Her eyes were closed. She wore no makeup. Without it, her face looked defenseless. I was glad someone had paid for a private room. I wondered who.

The TV was on, displaying some game show. The volume was off. If Valerie chose to open her eyes, she could see smiling faces win and lose, brightly dressed Barbie dolls jump up and down.

I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or resting. I stood by the bed a little while, waiting. The lashes fluttered.

“Hi,” I said.

She gave no indication that she’d heard or seen me. Her eyes closed again.

“You okay?” I said.

“No,” she said flatly, in such a quiet voice that I had to lean over to catch the monosyllable.

“Does your arm hurt? Want me to find a nurse who can give you something?”

Her eyes opened again, and her mouth moved in a humorless grimace. “Somebody who can knock me out for a million years, maybe,” she said.

“Your nose doesn’t look so hot, but it will. I broke my nose three times.”

“Really?”

“Yep,” I said.

For a minute I thought she might actually smile, but then her mouth shook and she whispered, “It’s not my stupid nose.”

“I know, Valerie.”

“Sure.” She pressed her lips tightly shut as if the one bitter word had escaped without her permission.

“I read your notebook.”

“Shit,” she said. “I mean, did Geoff pass it around? I mean, the cops and that shrink … Does everybody know about me?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“It’s not my nose or my arm or my teeth,” she said. “If you read my stupid notebook, you know that. I wish to hell I’d never written it down, never passed it in—”

“Listen to me, Valerie. You didn’t do anything wrong. Your father—” she winced when I said the word. I repeated it. “Your father did a terrible thing to you. But you didn’t do anything wrong by telling.”

“You don’t understand—” she began, her voice getting louder, her cheeks reddening.

“Not unless you tell me,” I agreed quietly.

She bit her lower lip with her teeth and closed her eyes. I waited until she opened them. “He was my dad,” she said, haltingly at first, then picking up speed. “And I loved him. You know. I wanted him to be happy—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And what you ought to know about me, what everybody ought to know—is that sometimes I wanted it. I mean, I enjoyed it. It was like being better than my mom, and he depended on me—so it’s not like I’m normal or anything—I asked for it, and it’s my fault he’s dead—”

“How old were you, Valerie? When it started?”

“I don’t remember,” she murmured. “When I was real little he’d just, you know, just touch me. And he’d say how good I felt, and how much he loved me, and how special I was. And how Mommy was sick and I could help her by being the secret Mommy. But it had to be our special secret. I could never, never tell.”

“Valerie, you were a child. You had no choice—”

“Later, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to get on top. It hurt, and I knew it wasn’t right, but he loved me so much—and now he’s dead and it’s my fault—”

“No,” I said firmly, trying to catch her eye, to hold it, to burn the words home. “Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever think that, Valerie.”

I put my hand over hers the way I had while we waited for the ambulance, and she cried, tears running unchecked down her face, sliding into the white pillows under her head.

“And then there’s Geoff,” she said, gulping through her tears. “Geoff tried to help me and—” She was off on a fresh round of sobbing. I found a box of tissues and handed them to her.

When she’d composed herself a little I asked, “You want a glass of water or anything?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cry.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“It’s like all I do.” She wadded used tissues in her hands. “All I do is cry.”

“It’s okay,” I repeated. Then after a long pause, punctuated by her sniffles and gulps, I said, “If you want to, talk about Geoff, that’s okay, too.”

“What about him?”

“Anything,” I said. “Anything you want to tell me.”

“Did you know him?”

“I met him,” I said.

“He was so handsome, wasn’t he?” she said, staring at the television screen. “And he always wanted us to talk to him, to tell him stuff, to tell him secrets and stuff, things we wouldn’t tell anybody else. He had a game we used to play in class, a truth game, where you’d have to tell something truthful about yourself, something you’d never told anybody before. He said it would build trust, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I liked him. He seemed so, you know, interested in me, like he could see something in me that nobody else could.”

How attractive that must have been, I thought. Being special to a man who looked like Geoffrey Reardon.

“I couldn’t say anything about, you know, anything in class,” she said. “I wouldn’t, but more and more, I’d think about telling him, and then I wrote it in my notebook. I wasn’t gonna pass it in. I just wrote it. I don’t know what I was thinking. And then he said I’d fail if I didn’t hand it in right then, and I just did. It was like I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed him to know. But then I couldn’t face him—”

“So you ran away.”

“Yeah.”

I said, “You ran away because of Jerry Toland, too, right? Because he kissed you?”

“I thought he was my friend, but—”

“He hired me to find you.”

“Not my—my, uh, dad?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said.

“A lot of people care about you, Valerie,” I said.

“I got Geoff killed,” she said. “That’s my fault, too.” Her words came out in a low flat whisper. She wasn’t crying, but her chest shook. She probably didn’t have any tears left.

I thought about Geoff Reardon, urging his students’ confidences, expecting nothing he couldn’t handle. I wondered how he justified his prying. Once he got his students to tell their stories, to own up to their truths, what did he expect? If a kid fell apart under the weight of all that knowledge, did he know how to put her back together again? Or was he practicing psychiatry without a license?

Like me.

“Your father killed Geoff Reardon,” I said. “You had no control over what your father did.”

“I got my father killed.”

“But it was never your fault. Not for the tiniest moment. Not for one second. You did the right thing. You had to tell somebody.” I wished that Reardon had handled her confidence differently, gone straight to some school psychologist.…

“Valerie,” I went on when she didn’t say a thing, “let me use a real cornball word here. You know what you are? You’re a hero.”

“Heroine,” she said.

“Nah,” I said. “It always sounds watered down that way. You went back to that house to rescue your little sister. You protected her from your father. You’re a hero. A secret hero if that’s the way you want it to be, but a hero.”

“I don’t want to be a stupid hero.”

“I know,” I said. “But sometimes you don’t get a choice.”

A nurse came in with orange juice and a hypo, and asked me what I thought I was doing. Visiting hours had not yet begun and I would have to leave immediately. She was of the old school, immaculately white-clad, her cap rigged at battle tilt. Not a woman to trifle with.

“I’ll be back, Valerie,” I promised, squeezing her good right hand.

Tears were running down her cheeks and I’m not sure she heard me. I hoped they were cleansing tears, but I knew she needed more help than I could give her, help for the rest of her life.